Saturday, April 18, 2009

What you can expect from this blog

The organizing principle of this food blog will be science - not science as a body of knowledge, but science as a process for arriving at the truth. In that vein, you can expect to see four different types of posts in general: exploration, experimentation, challenges, and creation.

Explorations will be a way for me to make a foray into some sort of new idea or ingredient. I plan on exploring wasabi and tamarind in the near future, both of which are ingredients I have never before used in my cooking. I'll see what they are like to work with and what can be made from them.

Experiments are a way to use the scientific method to test a hypothesis and (hopefully) arrive at a conclusion. The best kind of experiment on human subjects is a controlled double-blind experiment testing against a placebo. The null and alternative hypotheses should be stated in advance, as well as conditions for rejecting the null hypothesis. That is, you say in advance what is required in order to say that the hypothesis you tested is true. I will try to use this process to determine, for example, whether placing a metal spoon in the mouth of a bottle of champagne preserves the bubbles.

Challenges will be a way for readers and friends to dare me to do something new and exciting or just silly. I've already accepted a challenge to create a dinner party with all yellow dishes and to make a delicious vegan breakfast.

And "creation" is just a fancy word for something I made that doesn't fall into the above categories. It's more fun and mad-scientisty than the word "recipe."

Thank you for reading and helping me use this flog to have the most delicious fun possible! I welcome questions, comments, and - best of all - challenges!